WHAT MAKES US DIFFERENT?

Hunters vs. Anti-Hunters

 By Dave Henderson

Virtually all of us occasionally get murderous with flies and mosquitoes. A good percentage of the populace has no problem with trapping or otherwise dispatching rodents, spiders and maybe even snakes. But an ever-dwindling portion of our population today would pull the trigger on a deer or rabbit.

"It’s all a matter of where we draw the line, isn’t it?" says Wayne Pacelle, head of the anti-hunting Humane Society of the United States and former chairmen of the Friends of Animals.

The drawing of that line is indeed an individual quirk. Nobody protests the poisoning of crabgrass in your lawn or the fatal uprooting of weeds. There is no organization rising up against the pagan December ritual of murdering an evergreen and propping up its gaudily-decorated corpse in the living room. Only a minuscule percentage of radical nitwits are revolted by the idea of the genetic manipulation and/or slaughter that went into that side dish of vegetables.

Yet the idea of putting the crosshairs on a doe feeding in a food plot remains horrific to many Americans.

What determines where each of us draws that line? Just what is it in the human makeup that makes us different? What makes one person a hunter and another disinterested, or even opposed to the thought of killing an animal? What are the primal urges that stimulate either excitement or revulsion at the sight of a blood trail?

Certainly education and environment affects varied stances. Some people cite the difference between rural and urban mentalities. Others feel that it’s a subliminal feeling of kinship to pioneer ancestors.

Philosophers and psychologists can give us educated opinions on what makes some of us hunters and others not. But I’m not convinced that anyone really knows the answer. I suspect that the true reasoning is too complex and personal; still a dark area in our still-evolving knowledge of the human psyche.

That would explain why my brothers, who grew up in the same household that I did, choose not to hunt while that pastime is a personal passion that rules my professional and private life. The key, to my way of thinking, is that being the oldest, I had a lot of opportunities to hunt with Dad. But he died young, when my younger siblings were still in their early teens, and they were robbed of that paternal influence and guidance.

Basically, we grew up in different environments under the same roof.

I'm quite sure, by the same token, that living with me and, therefore, experiencing hunting first hand is the main reason my wife and daughter – two intelligent and independent women – are today not anti-hunters.

Yes, environment is undeniably a major key in forming the hunting or anti-hunting mindset. What you are exposed to intellectually, physically, politically and philosophically in your everyday life is obviously a major factor in shaping your attitude and beliefs.

That's why the ever-increasing urbanization of America and the rising number of single-parent households corresponds with the dwindling number of hunters in today's society. And while hunting numbers drop, the opposition to hunting grows.

While all of us – hunters and non-hunters alike – live in the same environmental glass house, there are plenty of people willing to throw bricks at those of us who enjoy hunting. You will find that those opposed to killing wildlife often draw the line according to the temperature of the creature's blood or its “cuteness.” Criteria for empathy, it seems, is the threshold of pain or an impressionable look.

A fly’s final moments hopelessly adhered to a no-pest strip, an earthworm skewered on a hook or a mouse smashed to death in a trap is somehow less offensive than a buck being dispatched with a well-placed bullet.

I know sincere people who have become vegetarians to protest the killing of meat animals – but who regularly sit down to fish dinners, or worse yet, omelettes.

It is all a matter of viewpoint, which is in turn formulated by what one is exposed to and thus impressed by. Walt Disney is the patron saint of the anti-hunting faction – a radical, generally urban block often made up of people with a big dog on a short leash in a small apartment. They tend to have less compassion for a species than for an individual animal.

The Bambi and bunny group derives its knowledge of nature from the media, not experience. Their feelings are based on misconceptions and misguided sentiment, often based on cartoon animals with human names and emotions that talk and reason and connive. There was not a hunter in the original Swiss fairytale of “Bambi” – it took Disney to add the “dire” element.

If you will allow for obvious overlaps and subsequent gray areas, the opposing factions in the hunting argument can generally be predicted by their sociological backgrounds and environment.

Urban liberal societies are used to the centralized authority of white-collar bureaucrats, conveniences to shield them from nature, and meat rendered painlessly between cellophane and cardboard. To the rural conservative, however, less government is better, the frontiersman was a hero rather than a misfit, life is a constant competition with nature and meat is rendered by blade and/or bullet.

Ask a city kid where water comes from and he’ll show you the faucet. The rural child knows the source and thus the value of water. Rain in the city is depressing, or at least inconvenient, while it is not only welcome but also cherished in rural environments.

Dirt to an urban dweller is something to be avoided; to the rural type it is a valuable and life-sustaining commodity.        

In the country, food comes from the outdoors while the urban mind views a store as its source. The urban society’s connection with death is street violence and war. Firearms are weapons in the city and tools in the country.

In urban environments, animals are associated with domesticated pets rather than a source of food. These people view nature as an idyllic pastoral stage where no animal ever dies except at the hands of a cruel and inept hunter.

The urban mind, even when transplanted to a rural environment, will never be convinced that hunting is an essential tool for managing wildlife populations. They’ll never see the fact that killing a few animals is the best possible thing for the herd. In fact, most non-hunters don’t think of the herd but only of an individual animal.

The biological necessity of hunting is ignored while the non-hunter agonizes over the death of a single animal. Nature, to these people, is not a big picture but rather what they personally see – often a quarter-acre of ChemLawn, “red neck” neighbors, a bird feeder, a running feud with raccoons over the garbage, and maybe some crack corn scattered for local deer and turkeys.

These are the people who are horrified when a “mean” hawk snatches a bunting from their backyard bird feeder or a “horrible” coyote grabs a young rabbit from the lawn.

The rural view – likely the one taken by those “red neck neighbors” – is more literal. There is a realization that life and death are the stock and trade of nature. If there is no mass production and mass slaughter, the whole system goes to pot.

Rural society – where rearing and slaughter and planting and harvesting are facets of everyday life – realizes that it is only a biased human notion that death is the worst possible alternative. In the wild, it is not a matter of IF an animal will be killed but rather WHEN and HOW it will be killed.

While we’ll never be able to fully explain the affection for the hunt any more than we can describe emotion, we can certainly see the factors that go into making us different.